Here are some in-depth articles about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) poised to be voted on this year in the U.S.A.
SOPA will effect users world wide.
I post them as a starting point of discussion and awareness of this act.

It looks like the Week of Action Against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, has made a difference. Although there wasn't enough opposition to kill the bill outright, the messages we've been sending for weeks — that the bill would create blacklists for online censorship, harm cybersecurity efforts, set a bad international precedent, and lead to a fractured Internet — couldn't be ignored. Chairman Lamar Smith acknowledged that the Judiciary Committee didn't yet have all the facts, and announced that markup would be suspended until the next practicable opportunity — tentatively scheduled for late January.

Thanks for starting the thread.
A lot of organizations and individual persons
here in Europe is very upset about it and so am I.

The companies behind the Lobby that proposed it
gets too much power in their hand.

Youtube as we know it today will most likely have to change
a lot.

and even our forum here has to be very vigilant and stop
any link to music or other copyrighted things.

So a villain that want to destroy for us can bomb us
with such links and there are too few moderators to keep up
so it is bad bad bad._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

Exactly - I can imagine one is putting, let's say, "Copyright bomb" on some site,
then site will be closed, and so on, and so on...
...and we can reach the day, when accessing net we'll get "Sorry, internet has been banned" message...
Half funny, half serious, but possible...

One more thought:
IF SOPA will become reality, forums like this must have:
1. Brilliant filters to distinguish links leading to copyrighted materials, or
2. Prohibition of posting links, or
3. Moderation of every post before publishing.

Every point listed above (I assume that 1st point is rather impossible to implement) leads to death of free forum concept, IMHO...

PS. D@mn it, why I became so pessimistic today??
Let someone present any positive point of view, PLEASE!

Although Go Daddy reversed their stance on SOPA, it wasn’t before 37,000 domains were transfer off of its service, according to information reported by The Domains. The report indicates that over 15,000 domains were transferred off Thursday and another 21,054 domains on Friday. If you factor in the $6.99 to $10.99 fees associated with each of those domain registrations, Go Daddy is losing a significant amount of money.

if you know how business works
you dont have a business when your customers
leave

since this forum uses Go Daddy
it would be wise to do some back ups soon

Meanwhile:
At last, after hard, intensive thinking (<- joke), I finally found a bright side of this whole SOPA thing.
When SOPA becomes true and our (illusion of?) freedom will be restricted, it may cause, that our sense of solidarity will grow
and more people start to publish their work under GNU/GPL and Creative Commons.
If the enemy is known and threatens the masses, people (even if they were antagonists) tend to unite and share with each other.

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